Legendary singer Bruce Springsteen gave a bravura performance at Texas' South by Southwest conference today, earning a standing ovation from fans for a whirlwind tour of the musical influences that have shaped his four decades-long career.

Giving a much anticipated keynote address to the famous festival – and following in the footsteps of icons like Johnny Cash, Pete Townsend and Neil Young – Springsteen spoke for almost an hour on his life and times.

The 62-year-old New Jersey native, whose new album Wrecking Ball has been a critical smash, ended with a stirring cry from the heart that seems likely to end up as a poster or a prayer on the bedroom walls of a generation of wannabe rock stars. "Rumble, young musicians, rumble," Springsteen told the crowd. "Open your ears, open your hearts. Don't take yourselves too seriously and take yourself as seriously as death itself."

Then he continued: "Don't worry. Worry your ass off. Have iron clad confidence. But doubt! It keeps you awake and alert. Believe you are the baddest ass in town and you suck. It keeps you honest. Be able to keep two completely contradictory ideas alive and well in your heart and head at all times. If it does not drive you crazy it will make you strong. Stay hard, stay hungry and stay alive."

But that outburst of vocal poetry was just one of many touching moments designed to thrill an audience that, via a livestream carried on National Public Radio, reached out to Springsteen loyalists and music fans across the world.

He struck a humorous tone from the beginning, querying the decision to hold the speech at the ungodly – to musicians at least – hour of noon. "Why are we up so fucking early? How important can this speech be if we are giving it at noon. It can't be that important. Every decent musician in town is asleep," he said.

Perhaps reflecting a musician's flexible sense of timing, Springsteen had himself arrived on stage a half hour late. But the Boss quickly hit his stride by talking about his earliest memories of seeing Elvis on television as a child in the 1950s: a moment that inspired him to pick up a guitar while just six years old. It was, he said, his "genesis" moment. "It was the evening that I realised a white man could make magic," he said.

Springsteen described a litany of musical legends who helped shape his tunes and his politics and his sense of what made a great rock song. He praised Roy Orbison for defining teenage heartbreak and sexuality. "He was the true master of the romantic apocalypse that you dread and knew was coming after the first night you whispered 'I love you' to your new girlfriend. You knew you were going down," he said.

Then he lauded producer Phil Spector, the Beatles and – most of all – the Animals. That latter act he credited with introducing the idea that politics and social anger had a place in popular music. Springsteen picked up a guitar and sang a few verses from the Animals' hit We Gotta Get Out Of This Place. At the end Springsteen claimed: "That's every song I have written. That's all of them. I'm not kidding either ... it was the first time I felt I heard something come across the radio that mirrored my home life and my childhood."

Then Springsteen added another throw-away quip about the importance of borrowing from your inspirations that is sure to become one of the most quoted bits of his speech. "Listen up, youngsters, this is how successful theft is accomplished," he joked to loud applause.

Springsteen left out few genres or big names. Soul music and Motown, James Brown and Curtis Mayfield, Hank Williams and country music: all got a nod. Springsteen made a point to say that he had been inspired by country to focus on telling the stories of ordinary men and women in his songs. "In country music I found the adult blues. I found the working men and women's stories I had been looking for," he said.

But he also said that the genre lacked the political bite that he also wanted. "Country seemed not to question why. It was about doing then dying, screwing then crying, boozing then trying," he said.

His answer was found in the work of folk musician Woody Guthrie, whose most famous song was This Land Is Your Land. "Woody's world was a world where fatalism was tempered by a practical idealism ... he is a big, big ghost in the machine," he said.

If the speech was Springsteen's attempt to explain the forces shaping his astonishingly successful and lengthy career – which now spans 17 studio albums – it succeeded in fine style. He struck an all-encompassing tone, paying poetic tribute to his heroes. But Springsteen also appeared to be seeing the occasion as an opportunity to pass on advice to a younger generation.

He marvelled over the technological changes that had spanned his life from vinyl records to the iPod and how rock and roll had mutated into an uncountable number of genres and sub-genres. But, in the end, he insisted that the same old formula for success still existed: be honest and true to yourself.

"There is no right way, no pure way of doing it. There is just doing it," he said. "We live in a post-authentic world. Today authenticity is a house of mirrors. It's all just what you are bringing when the lights go down, its your teachers, your influences, your personal history. At the end of the day it's the power and the purpose of your music that still matters."